made as devils. Do we not all feel a devil within us, which needs to be bridled and trampled on, for whose uprisings we almost tremble, which we know that nothing but God's grace can effectually keep down? If all men were revealed as they are-if those secret sins of theirs were shewn, which they cover up so closely from their wives and friends-still more, if those secret inclinations of the heart were manifested, which for lack of opportunity, or for fear of discovery, or from the necessity of keeping up appearances, or from the restraints of their position, they dare not let pass into actions,—should we not be compelled to own with shame how much of the devil there is in human nature? What, again, would men be without the grace of Christ, the Gospel of Christ, among them, seeing what they are with these restraining influences? What are men in those darkened regions of central Africa, from which one of England's enterprising sons has of late returned, to tell us of countries where cruelty and contempt for human life reign so triumphant, that a sovereign sends to instant butchery four hundred and fifty of his subjects, to revenge himself for a disappointment with which they had no concern? Ah! my brethren, see what reliance you can place on Satan's word,

when this is the fulfilment of his promise, "ye shall be as gods." "In the day that ye eat thereof your eyes shall be opened," he said; and our eyes are opened-to see the pettiness, the hollowness, the selfishness, that more or less taint every human heart. Our eyes are opened; for is it not true that they are quick to perceive the flaws and faults of others, slow to recognise their redeeming qualities? We are quick to attribute wrong motives, slow to admit the existence of right; all that is bad, and coarse, and poor, about our brethren, how clearly we discern it! Truly, it is an awful gift that Satan has conferred in opening our eyes, since it shews us only how sunk and fallen are others, ourselves, the world we live in-since it has thus only darkened and clouded over our intercourse with our fellow men! It was not this that Eve contemplated in Satan's promise; she looked for loftier, nobler, more roseate views of things: again, you see, Satan lied to her, and in her transgression she was deceived. And what thus marked the first sin, marks all sin; it allures only through deceiving, through pretending to give what it never can. We sin because we hope to get some real good thereby. Cases, indeed, there are of extreme wickedness, where

evil is sought and delighted in for its own sake; but, ordinarily, man sins because there is something about the temptation that is pleasant to the eyes, and seems worthy of desire. And in this fact is a proof of our mixed nature, of elements of good yet mingling with our moral being, and thus of our fall from a state once nobler and higher. If we were altogether evil, evil would then allure us for its own sake; it would not need to hide itself under the mask of good. That, to appeal to us with success, it must do this, shews that we have yet some lingering sympathy with good. But that pretence of good is ever a lie. Take this to heart, those of you, especially, who have not yet made large experience of life's temptations. Agony, and shame, and death, oceans of blood, and rivers of tears, tortures of mind and body-all the long catalogue of crime and woe, which fills the volume of the history of our race-all that you and I, at this remote period of this world's course, have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to sufferthis is the fruit of that one temptation, which Satan gilded over with the prospect of such brilliant consequences, "ye shall be as gods." It was one mighty lie, big with ruin and with death. So, believe me, will it be in its degree with

every sin in which you allow yourselves. It also will deceive; for a time, perhaps, completely; but, sooner or later, the awakening will come. Ah, that is the terrible result of sin, that one day I must come to see that it has fooled me, cheated me, that I have been a sufferer by it, that it has robbed me of true blessings, while giving me shams. Well! if this awakening come in time, ere habit has so welded sin into our nature that we can no longer tear it from us. For that is the most awful condition to which a man can come the following sin from the force of custom, though we perceive its hollownessthe cleaving to it, through the tyranny of habit, though it no longer deceives, and we know it to be a lie the still plucking its fruits, though we have tasted their bitterness, and serving for its wages, though we are convinced they are death.

Such, then, is sin; and the history of the Fall will further teach us in what the essence of sin lies. Sin does not merely consist in those coarser outbreaks of human corruption, which set at defiance plain laws of morality, and endanger the purity or security of social life. Sin is not the monopoly of the adulterer, the fornicator, the liar, the defrauder, the man-slayer, or, what is

hardly better, the man-stealer. It is something more subtle and dangerous by far. For observe, my brethren: Eve's was, no doubt, in a certain sense a good wish. It was not so much appetite for the forbidden fruit that possessed her, as a desire to rise higher, to be as God, to acquire wisdom, to reach a nobler level, to "see with larger, other eyes than ours." She desired to anticipate that elevation in her condition, for which man was probably intended; but she would achieve it in her own way, instead of waiting till God gave it to her. They might be gifts, graces, things really good in themselves, that she desired; but to desire them before implicit obedience to the will of God was sin. Yes, here is the essence of sin, in the contradiction of that will. Let those who think themselves advanced in the Divine life take their stand upon that definition, and see how far they have yet escaped from the trammels of corruption. You wish for such and such things, for freedom from a temptation that haunts you, for the opening of opportunities which would enable you to do so much for religion some advantage, which you think you could make so serviceable to the cause of Christ's Church, seems within your reach by the use of a little tact or finesse, about which, how